Business as Usual Series: Report from a GA

I’m a GA in the English department. I wrote a letter to the DE last week about how GA’s are the faces of education freshman and sophomores see their first two years on campus. When I’ve asked my students this week about the disruption to their classes, only about 6 in 41 have been taught by substitutes (or at least volunteered information about it). This reiterates my point – most of them are taught by GA’s who are in their classes and teaching during the strike.

2 of my own 3 classes may have been manned by substitutes, but because there is absolutely no way the substitutes are qualified to replace my professors in any way, I have not attended class. I am not even going to participate in that charade. I would rather be on the picket line supporting my professors and the future credibility of my degrees. This will be the third degree I’ve received from SIU and I don’t want any of them to have an asterisks by them.*

*As with baseball players who may have broken records but who may have used steroids; I don’t want my degrees to need asterisks to indicate which were earned when SIU was a quality institution and which were earned when it wasn’t.